Disnix: A toolset for distributed deployment

Sander van der Burg, Eelco Dolstra. Disnix: A toolset for distributed deployment. In Third International Workshop on Academic Software Development Tools and Techniques (WASDeTT-3). WASDeTT, September 2010.

Abstract

The process of deploying a distributed system in a network of machines is often very complex, labourious and time consuming, while it is hard to guarantee that the system will work as expected and that certain non-functional requirements from the domain are supported. In this paper we describe the Disnix toolset, which enables automatic deployment of a distributed system in a network of machines from declarative specifications and offers properties such as complete dependencies, atomic upgrades and rollbacks to make this process efficient and reliable. Disnix has an extensible architecture, allowing the integration of custom modules to build a distributed deployment architecture that takes non-functional requirements of the domain into account. Disnix has been under development for almost two years and has been applied to several types of distributed systems, including an industrial case study.